Tuesday, May 27, 2014

- What if ... NOT: Inkjet printing on premounted cloth

One of the (many) things I like about Jude Hill is her "What if ...?" approach to creativity. So I had a thought:

What if I created a kitchen towel cloth that combined a polygonal map of our property with the topo contours of the neighborhood swirling around it?

It was a pretty good idea, but it went wrong when I took it one step further to:

What if I print our property map on the cotton cloth I bought and appliqué that onto a tea-dyed linen napkin?

Then stitch over the lines of elevation?

Except ... the cotton was so white (maybe some tea dye?) ... and so stiff (maybe my thumb will callous?) ... and there were so many extraneous marks (maybe they'll wash out?). There were just too many maybes.

In fact, the only thing I really liked was the back:

So it has been undone.

Lesson learned: this thing was stitched to stay on forever. Now it's back to the drawing board.

PostScript:

What if I use some packing tape to clean up all those loose threads?

Nice!

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And now a story (1) ... the first of many I hope. Because it occurred to me that the things that give us the most pleasure are meaningful because of the stories behind them.

So I'm going to try to end each post with a story about something I love, beginning with my mother's quilt.

The story begins at the Williamsburg Soap and Candle Factory quilt shop, where Mom picked out fabrics during a Christmas visit before our girls were even born. She worked on the quilt blocks in-between many smaller quilting projects over the course of two decades.

It actually has a part of its story inscribed on the back by the woman who ultimately quilted it:

The sad part of the story is that my mom never saw the quilt completed. Instead, the blocks that she pieced sat in a box until after her death. And after it was quilted and returned to Shelter Island, it ended up in a linen closet.

Happily, it now rests on the bed in which I slept as a child. But that's another story.

It's a long way from Williamsburg, Virginia to the Texas Hill Country, but I've never looked back. Instead, my days are full of stitching, natural dyeing, assemblage art appreciation, grandparenting, cactus whacking, Americana music and Tex-Mex cooking ... not to mention wildflowers and critters.
As local bard Robert Earl Keen says, "The road goes on forever & the party never ends."